IJVS Volume 1 Edition 4 - editorial

1. When we started planning for IJVS the Editorial Advisory Committee gave some considerable thought to the problem of page numbering and never quite sorted it out. We were fully aware that people would want to refer to articles, diagrams, or tables, but we ran across the technical problem of page length.

If the default parameters on your software and printer match ours, your hard copy output will retain page integrity. Put another way – your page 27 will exactly match ours. If the conditions do not match, then gradually the page number you have differs from the input. As a result, we cannot number the pages for you. Various propositions were made, such as indicating the end of each input page, but they really were far from satisfactory.

2. All the best ideas are pinched from somebody else – why not re-invent what is done in the Bible – you know: Luke VI vs.10. The plan is to number each paragraph (we will skip very short ones) so that each Edition will be numbered from para. 1 – n. We will put the paragraph number at its beginning, in bold. As you can see, we have already started. The paragraph number is preceded by the Edition number, so if you wish to refer to this paragraph in the future, it would be 42 and thus the complete citation would read:

P. J. Hendra, Internet J.Vib.Spect., 1 (1997) 42.

We plan to produce six editions per year, so the first digit will never exceed six and it is unlikely that the number of paragraphs will exceed 99 in any one edition. Of course, it won’t really matter if the number runs into the hundreds.

3. The advantages of this method are that it is unambiguous, very clear, simple, and very close to the system used in regular hard copy journals. In fact, it is more specific, defining a paragraph rather than a page. We plan to run the method for two editions, allowing you the readers to scream. If it seems to be acceptable, we will number Editions I, II and III and away we go.

Last time I mentioned that we could not think of a good title for the section including responses, queries and answers from readers. Wendy came up with some ingenious suggestions, including R.E.A.R. (Readers’ Enquiries and Responses) and then had some real inspiration – why not cash in on the current Jane Austen craze and entitle the section “Dear Reader”. Having just seen “Pride and Prejudice”, I fell in love with this idea immediately.

Thus it is with some hesitancy, nay trepidation, that we impose on your patience and proffer the title in this Edition at paragraph 85. I would, of course, deem it a singular honour if you would respond and give us all the benefit of your thoughts on this delicate matter.

4. In this edition we are featuring reflection methods in the infrared. The coverage is far from exhaustive and will be taken up again and again, I am sure, in subsequent editions but here we “kick off” with a simplistic survey of the various methods. The physics of reflection can be a bit daunting, so in this introduction to the subject I have kept the theory very firmly at bay. Don’t get complacent – it lurks in hiding and is sure to leap out in the future!

5. I am not in any way an expert in this field, so with some relief I persuaded Alex Shchegolikhin and his colleague Olga Lazareva to write the section on DRIFTS. In future editions we will pick up each of these techniques and cover them in much more detail.

As time goes by I hope we will have an increasing flow of submitted papers. When I see an article I think would interest you folks, I write and ask the author to produce something for us. Many are in the pipeline but four have arrived for this edition. Thus, Alex Shchegolikhin and Olga Lazareva have sent in an interesting piece showing how a simple modification to the normal DRIFTS procedure makes it more easy to use, more routine and also more versatile.

6. One of our features is “Hot Sources” – the idea is that as time goes on so people will be able to find a good literature source very quickly; a source recommended by an experienced user. I have provided lots BUT you folks are not helping! We have received a couple of corrections and one suggestion – thanks – these are very valuable. PLEASE send me some more.

7. Wendy’s son Rob is in the banking and commercial world and has received notification of some very nasty bugs which I suspect are circulating round a part of the Web fairly distant from our own. Hopefully they will not hit the scientific community, but you never know, so we reproduce these warnings – TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY. See IJVS 1 (1997) 4 12

8. Now that IJVS is settling down, I have to report a severe problem. People are doing what we ask and corresponding with us by e-mail – no problems. They are also following our instructions and sending in articles electronically. This is turning out to be a nightmare! Frequently we receive material in formats we simply don’t know or cannot access. By the time we have identified the material and unsorted it, days can have passed, thereby defeating the whole object. People have problems with diagrams and we often receive manuscripts with diagrams and figures missing, or scrambled. We then FAX the authors and eventually receive the documents by FAX. I therefore suggest we change our methods.

9. Articles should initially be submitted by FAX. After refereeing and alteration – all by FAX or e-mail – the final manuscript must be sent on a disk in the correct format. We will not accept hard copy, as this has to be re-typed. It sounds a little odd to go back to snail mail but I am certain this will be faster in the long run. What do you authors and readers think???

10. Our intention from the start of publication has been that the Journal should include short, easy to read, and up to date mini-reviews. The first is to hand and appears at

IJVS 1 (1997) 4-68

11. Last time, the question of spectral data, its presentation, and use by readers, was raised. I mentioned the question of copyright. Nobody responded, so I presume few people are worried. Bob Lancashire and Tony Davies have written an authoritative piece on spectral data and it appears below at

IJVS 1 (1997) 4-57

12. VIRUS ATTACK

If you receive an e-mail entitled “JOIN THE CREW” DO NOT open it! It will erase EVERYTHING on your hard drive! Send this letter out to whoever you can – this is a new virus and not many people know about it. This information was received today from IBM. Also, if anyone receives mail entitled “PENPAL GREETINGS” please DELETE IT WITHOUT READING IT! This message appears to be a friendly letter asking if you are interested in a penpal, but by the time you read the letter it will be TOO LATE. The “Trojan Horse” virus will have already infected the boot sector of your hard drive, destroying all of the data present. It is a self-replicating virus and once the message is read, it will AUTOMATICALLY forward itself to anyone whose e-mail address is present in YOUR mailbox. This virus will DESTROY your hard drive and holds the potential to DESTROY the hard drive of anyone whose mail is in your box. If this virus keeps getting passed on, it has the potential to do a great deal of damage to computer networks worldwide. So please delete the message entitled “PENPAL GREETINGS” as soon as you see it.

13. There is another recent virus circulating. DO NOT OPEN or even look at any mail you receive that says “RETURNED or UNABLE TO DELIVER”. This virus will attach itself to your computer components and render them useless. Immediately delete any mail items that say this. AOL has said this is a very dangerous virus and there is NO remedy for it at this time. PLEASE, BE CAREFUL.

We have since discovered that these warnings, and all like them, are hoaxes. We include them here as a warning of the kind of hoaxes you might receive by email and also as a reassurance that your data is not under threat from this kind of attack. Please be aware though of the potential dangers of genuine viruses and take care to protect your computer from them.

P. J. HENDRA